Annie

The source photograph gives her a single name: Annie. It dates to 1879 and is credited to L.A. Huffman, who reached Fort Keogh, Montana Territory, in December of that year as the post's unpaid photographer, working out of a log building with a dirt floor. Northern Cheyenne families, many of whom had surrendered at the fort after the wars of 1876–77, lived close by, and they became the most constant presence in his early portraits. Huffman went on photographing the Plains people of the Yellowstone country, from that log studio and later from Miles City, for the rest of his working life.

A Cheyenne woman named Annie does appear in Huffman's surviving record. Among his portraits preserved in the Elmo Scott Watson collection at Chicago's Newberry Library — twenty-three Huffman studies of Cheyenne, Crow, and Sioux sitters from the Fort Keogh and Miles City years — is one identified as Annie, “Walk Aslant.” If she is the same woman, her record held two names after all: the English one the record-keepers used, and an English translation of her Cheyenne one. The match is probable rather than proven, and this page keeps that distinction where it belongs, in plain sight.

Captions like hers were the rule, not the exception: a first name bestowed at an agency, mission, or school, written down without family, band, or Cheyenne name beside it. For the women photographed at Fort Keogh — a garrison standing at the center of their nation's hardest decade — a single English word could be most of the paper trail a life left behind. What the photograph itself preserves is particular and hers: a Cheyenne woman at the end of the 1870s, holding still through a long exposure, looked at carefully then, and in this painting looked at carefully again.